Blockchain-based Online Review System

Abstract

An online review system is a tool that promotes the marketing strategies of tourism businesses. It also supports customers in product quality assessment. However, fraudsters exploit online reviews to gain more revenue or beat their competitors. Even though many tourism platforms have tried to handle the fake review problem, the results are not satisfying. Fake reviews are still concealing among authentic reviews. Customers have increased their concerns about untraceable management of platforms due to their questionable actions. Much literature suggested improving system transparency. People would increase their trust in a platform that they can keep track of actions behind it. Blockchain technology natively supports traceability. Thus, it has the potential to overcome problems related to trust. This work applies blockchain technology to the customer review use case. The author investigates the blockchain-based online review system in three aspects: usability, potential features, and problem-solving. The transaction cost and speed of the smart contract are tested to identify system usability. The experiment results indicate that a usable smart contract needs some techniques for minimizing its transaction cost. The potential features of the framework are accomplished by applying financial use cases and decentralized management to the system. Including payment generates supplies, which can be used to reward people for their contributions. The framework utilizes a community-driven ecosystem to handle fake reviews. It is a promising strategy for fake review management due to its flexibility. This work proposes a novel form of the online review system, which has the potential to improve the credibility of tourism online reviews.